It took an hour of convincing for her to believe it—this man, her closest of kin, entirely different from what she had expected, a whole man with barely any scars of old fragmentation, a father even, a brother suddenly. It took another three days, the only days left for her in Tehran, of nonstop contact and conversation, tears and laughter, for her to be able to accept it and let it go.
One could imagine that the simple lesson for Lala Adam would be how you could find a thing—how a thing could find you—when you first learned to let it go. But a decade earlier, on her first trip away from her family, when she had eventually thought she was letting go of everything, another lost thing had found her and taught her that some things wouldn’t let you lose them.
And as much as the earth lore would dictate People never change, apparently some would. As if it were an adolescent hormone, the cynicism in Lala Adam’s system seemed to run dry as her days went by. So much so that when finally in midlife she could look back on two of her losses found, she thought, sometimes you had to wonder about hope, and whether it did truly have a mind of its own.
Hungover, for days sleepless, lying in a twin bed in a fancier hotel than he could ever afford, across from a hungover sleepless girl-being in a twin bed who had afforded it all for them, Darius Adam shook himself awake to the reality on the phone.
“Darius, did you hear me?” Lala was shouting. “I said I found him!”
Darius tried to muster some enthusiasm for her cause. “Bob? Really?”
Lala groaned. “Who are you worried about here? No, stupid! Our son. I have him. He’s here. In New York. We’re together.”
He asked her to say it again; surely, he hadn’t heard it correctly.
“Darius, I have him. You heard me.”
She had him? She had him. Holy big wow.
Before he knew it, Darius was roaring into the phone, just roaring like an overfed lion. When he could finally form words, he told her to hold on and shouted the news in some barely coherent form to Suzanne who, half dressed, jumped to his side.
“No!” she cried. “No! No! YES!”
Darius finally asked the question of questions: “What happened to him?!”
“Oh, a lot—don’t worry about that now,” she said. She didn’t want to put Darius through it. She could barely believe it herself, how her trip to New York had taken on such purpose in such a swift turn. It had all happened very fast—specifically, on the tail end of one of her longest days, which she’d devoted to going from park to square to bigger park to barely square throughout the boroughs. She had returned to the hotel glumly, feeling a bit depressed after yet another vacation day alone. Bored, she had decided to call home and check the messages for no good reason. There was one, to her surprise, but it took several listens to understand who it was, much less make out what it said. The most important words came through, I need help, he had said over and over, wanting the hand of the only one of them not involved, the one who was the cleanest of conspiracy for his newly rattled self, fresh from the eye of paranoia. As much as anticipation would have prepped her for its being her brother, she knew, a mother knew, even in spite of the seeming impossibility—because of all people it shouldn’t have been, it was her son, not in Tehran, not with his girlfriend, but at a hotel outside JFK, where he had been questioned overnight and then had just stayed, unable to decide where home was exactly. How the hell do these things happen, she thought? Of all reasons to be in New York, she couldn’t believe it: to rescue her most lost man, her poor son. When she got there, she found a version of her son she hadn’t seen—shaking, exhausted, wasted, grateful. She took him back to his own apartment and spent the next day cleaning it manically as bit by bit he told her about Frankfurt, his questioning, and his apparent future date for further questioning. Her eyes would grow misty every time they would meet his; it had been years since she had been in a room with her son.
Twenty-four hours into their reunion, it occurred to her that she would have to share him with the others and call his father and girlfriend. But it was not her story to tell, she knew. So she told him, Xerxes, this is it. Now I want you to help yourself. I want you to make it better. I know you can. Come to peace, Xerxes, you know what I’m talking about. He knew for the first time, and he didn’t fight it. And they went over that final move, over and over, until he could do it and breathe at the same time.
“Woman, what? What should we do now?!” Darius was shouting.
“Well, to begin with, you guys can take your German vacation and transfer it over to New York,” Lala ordered. “But before that, Darius, because this is not even for me to explain, I am pleased to tell you your own son has asked to speak to you.”
Darius gasped, he hoped inaudibly. His heart was not going to endure this day, he thought, there was no way.
He asked her to repeat it. And again.
“Stop it, Darius, you heard me, you’re hearing everything I say, old man, wake up! Your son is going to speak to you now. Hold on. …”
There was a pause. Darius, with his eyes getting watery again, mouthed to Suzanne the word Xerxes, and she—eyes horribly slick, too—made a silent clapping gesture with her hands. He nodded, tried to smile, but in truth he was also afraid.
Scary thing, having died and died and died and now gone to heaven, he rationalized. And so here it was. The kingdom indeed.
On the other end, in another world altogether, Xerxes Adam—a different Xerxes Adam, even Xerxes had to admit, even if he feared a smaller, frailer, post-fall new man—found it in himself to sit back in his mother’s arms and listen to her whispers, Here, you can do it, you said you can, now go, my dear, let’s move forward, let’s come to peace, remember. …
He took the phone as if it were the man himself. Immediately the obstacle: an old sentence rushing at him—They had both decided they would do their best to make that moment, the one about the heaviness of carry-ons, the last time the two men would speak ever again—and just like that, in the highly flammable chambers of his old mind, Xerxes lit the sentence like the wick of a dynamite stick and let the words combust into shattered particles of forever-rejected memory refuse. … There was nowhere to go but on. He paused for just a few seconds and took a deep breath that felt like his first, and so he chose his oldest word, the best one, his first word. Originally produced at a time when his infant tongue was taught to take in only Farsi, this one English word he had digested tenaciously, echoing what had come from them strangely enough, as if with his parents’ name-dropping of it they knew where their near futures would take them—what fate, what land, what new tongue would replace the native tongue—so much so that the baby Xerxes, without any prompting, uttered its simple syllable, its lonely three letters, loud and clear one day in front of them. And here a quarter of a century later—once again after many months of crying wordlessly for intangible things, grasping fruitlessly for communication and its ajar if not simply open doors—he said that first word he knew he always had in him somewhere, the one word that never left him alone: “Dad?”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my tireless powerhouse of an agent, Rosalie Siegel; and my ever-wise ever-patient editor, Amy Hundley. My gratitude to Grove/Atlantic for their unflinching dedication—Elisabeth Schmitz for bothering to flip through that anonymous manuscript on her desk the year before and Morgan Entrekin for hearing her out and ultimately taking the risk. Also, a million thanks to my mentors Alice McDermott, Stephen Dixon, Melvin Jules Bukiet Danzy Senna, and Victoria Redel. Without Johns Hopkins University and Sarah Lawrence College, I would never have possessed the courage or the tools to face this.
Thanks as well to Jonathan Ames and Donald Antrim for their constant pats on the back, sage-like wisdom, and occasional wisecracks.
Thanks to Candice Tang for humoring this dream for twenty years.
Thanks to Brian Frank for breathing life back into me and teaching me to live through this.
Thanks to my incredible readers Daniel Maurer, Matthew Remmey Whi
te, Alan Lawrence, Jason Mojica, and—most essential—my brother Arta Khakpour (who is not Xerxes Adam, no matter what they say).
Thanks to my parents Asha and Manijeh Khakpour for putting up with this … and everything.
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